Blog Post

Get Ready for Pi Day 2010 (and the Big One in 5 Years)

There’s a big geeky holiday coming this weekend — and no, I don’t mean SXSW. It’s Pi Day on Sunday, aka March 14, aka 3/14. But in the leadup to this year’s day most resembling the constant ratio of the circumference of a circle to its diameter, many self-proclaimed nerds are ramping up for the longest extended Pi Day of our time, on 3/14/15. As a rapidly growing Facebook event, “The Only Pi Day of Our Lives,” explains,

Yes, the time is upon us. Everyone knows pi day is March 14th, but any true nerd realizes pi is not 3.14, but rather an irrational constant which continues infinitely in decimal expansion. Starting at 9:26:53 (.589… sec) AM, the longest extended Pi Day of our lives will come into action. The date, at the AM and PM hours, will be ” 3/14/15 at 9:26:53.589. Days like this only come once in a lifetime!

Sure, it might be a bit of an exaggeration to say “the time is upon us” for an event five years out, but honestly, what’s more charmingly nerdy than prepping for Pi Day? The Facebook event, which has 131,871 registered participants and encourages attendees to invite all the nerds they know, does note that 1592 was a better year for Pi Day, and that there are many way to interpret pi’s existence in all sorts of dates. Pi Day, by the way, is totally legit; it was officially recognized by the U.S. House of Representatives last year.

Image from piday.org. Video of a 6-year-old reciting 380 digits of pi in Japanese from YouTube.

8 Responses to “Get Ready for Pi Day 2010 (and the Big One in 5 Years)”

And 22nd July is actually written 22/7 (except in the USA). I’ve never seen anyone, even a Yank, write 14th March as 3.14, with a full stop instead of an oblique slant (which is also used as a divisor).